Society Pages

Okay, I was going to show off my Dr. Mid-Nite sketch first, but Mr. Terrific here didn’t turn out so well, so I kind of want to get him out of the way. Wow, this one went wrong. I re-drew almost everything except for the torso a number of times and I probably should have re-drawn that as well. He’s kind of lopsided and one hand is bigger than the other. Ugh.

Here’s the awesome Johnson original:

Then my lumpy, lopsided pre-colored verision:

And the final, colored piece, yeesh:

Haha, the finished product definitely looks like the kind of thing I would have drawn when I was about 10. Oh man…

I was talking to my buddies Ben and Rickey about one of their many train rides in to their big time city jobs. They had been talking about picking a superhero team and drawing that team’s members one by one. They told me about the idea, so I piped up that I wanted to draw my favorite team, the JSA. For more on their sketches, keep an eye out on their respective blogs.

Seeing as how I’m not much of an artist, I must resort to looking at an existing image and drawing it out. Basically copying it, but not tracing. I actually started on a Dr. Mid-Nite that I’m pretty happy with, but I left it at work and haven’t had a chance to finish coloring it. Well, tonight Em and I were at Target and I picked up a 50 pack of Crayola Super Tip Washable Markers so I could really show off the JSA’s vibrant costumes (there’s even 12 Silly Scents markers!). Well, I was pretty excited about my new markers (like I used to get as a kid when I got a brand new box of crayons) so I decided to give another JSAer the Dietsch treatment. Dr. Fate won the spot and here it is, first the image I copied, then the black and white and finally the colored version.

For what it’s worth, I start off with a pencil, sketching out the details and even where the shadows fall. Then I go over and outline things with a thin Sharpie. After that I fill in the shadows with a thicker black Sharpie.

After finishing the outlines and erasing any leftover pencil marks, it’s time to color. Crayola markers are a bit light and don’t saturate the paper as well, but they’re cheap and I really like seeing the drawings in color. Black and white is cool, but I love seeing those basic colors come to life. If Sharpie made a full line of cheaper markers, I’d be all over that. Of course, the problem would be the headaches. At least with the Crayola’s I’m guaranteed not to get a headache.

With the drawing over all, I skipped the cool hand effect which removes the light source. Even so, I still kept the shadows, but ditched the light spots in the original. I think this one came out pretty well. Em helped give me a second pair of eyes which helped. I’ve still got no idea what I’m doing and should definitely study anatomy or at least get a super poseable action figure that I can use as an artist model. Heck I could even use one of those How To Draw books, wonder where I could get one of those…